


small mercies

by axilet



Category: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 06:18:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2457974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axilet/pseuds/axilet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yomiel is perversely glad he hasn't lost the ability to feel pain of a sort, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	small mercies

The man in red is thinking about pain. He is kneeling in her swinging shadow consumed with it, shaking with it; as if a monster as monstrous as himself is clawing its way out of the deepest recesses of his being. He is thinking about happiness, a memory as faint as the memory of touch. He is thinking that this body of his that will never bleed, never age, never sicken, retains some echo of its humanity still; has not yet lost its heart. And he smiles, he falls over laughing, at his worry on the long journey here that he might be too strange for her, (too alive, and too dead), about the look in her eyes when she saw him; when she, in her wonderful, powerful love, had already solved these problems for them both. _I am coming to join you, Yomiel._ He imagines her, searching forever for the lover she remembered so fondly to the last, like perfection a goal best never reached; taking her farther, farther away from the shadow that had fallen over their lives.

Before he leaves he makes a phone call, tidies the place a bit, pointlessly; an open book closed and shelved, a rug smoothed out where the cat had flipped over a corner with an inquisitive paw. Yomiel kisses her dying note and places it carefully where he had found it, on the floor fallen from her limply dangling hand. Finally he scoops the cat up and holds him next to his face, not for the softness of his fur, which Yomiel cannot feel, but for the vibration of his purr, shaking that tiny body as if his life is bursting vicariously from its seams. The man in red allows himself to be warmed by that life for a moment in spirit if not in truth, a cold man holding out his hands to the fire. Then he drops the cat into his buttoned-up coat and walks out the door for the last time.

By the time he has returned to the street, the outside world that does not yet know its loss, he is thinking that if the cat refuses to leave anytime soon, he probably needs a name.

**Author's Note:**

> Short quick fic to work out writer block issues.


End file.
